It’s especially difficult to protect the privacy of individual persons. "When a person executes an access control using a mobile, it is enough to know that the person has permission to enter the building. More information about that person and his or her further activities are not required and should remain confidential," Dietrich added.

In the framework of SEPIA, Graz University of Technology researchers in cooperation with leading companies in the field (including Infineon, ARM, and brightsight) are aiming to increase security for future generations of mobile phones. "Confidential data protection is [the] number one priority at all development levels — from design to the finished product," Dietrich said. Focus of the research at IAIK is on anonymity-preserving processes. Furthermore, the researchers want to develop new security mechanisms for mobile phone processors of the future.

SEPIA will focus on three topics: Security enhancements of mobile platforms, cryptography, and privacy protecting technologies, as well as delta-evaluation and certification methodologies. A major objective of SEPIA is to define a next-generation security-architecture for mobile and embedded systems, addressing topics such as isolated execution space, virtualization, and secure protection of confidential data. Moreover, privacy protecting mechanisms, based on strong cryptography and time- and cost-efficient certification processes, reducing the time from design to market, will be researched in the project. In SEPIA, establishing trustworthiness is seen as an asset that is considered right from the design phase rather than being addressed as add-on feature. SEPIA will include theoretical and practical research as well as the development of proof-of-concept prototypes. All these efforts will result in the SEPIA reference platform which will be disseminated via demonstrators and as an open platform for further research and product development.

Dr. Dobb's encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task.
However, Dr. Dobb's moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing or spam. Dr. Dobb's further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Video

This month's Dr. Dobb's Journal

This month,
Dr. Dobb's Journal is devoted to mobile programming. We introduce you to Apple's new Swift programming language, discuss the perils of being the third-most-popular mobile platform, revisit SQLite on Android
, and much more!